Travel

"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be."
--Pink Floyd

I am a nomad. I slept in my tent for forty straight nights in New Zealand. I captained a boat up the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela. I came face to face with a bushmaster a day’s walk from civilization on the north coast of Trinidad. I climbed a mountain in the Himalayas. I looked south towards Antarctica from the southernmost tip of South America. I stuck my hand in the Arctic Ocean. I climbed a mountain under the midnight sun in Norway. I lived on a glacier in Alaska for a month. I panned for gold in French Guiana. I ran down a mountain in a hailstorm in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I kayaked a tributary of the Amazon that was so wide I couldn’t see the far shore. I slept under the Milky Way in the Utah desert. I played bamboo flute on the banks of the Ganges. I played drums in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I went scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I had an island in Fiji to myself one night. I walked four days to the border of Guyana. I watched the sun set over the Guatemalan rainforest from the top of a 1,200 year old Mayan ruin. I walked hours off trail into the Australian rainforest in the middle of the night and found my way back by following a string I had laid on the way in. I had a snowball fight on top of Hawaii’s highest mountain on the summer solstice. I navigated out of the Kau Desert in the middle of the night using the North Star to guide me. I opened a coconut with my bare hands on a beach in Papua New Guinea (Kin the Caveman taught me how). I woke at dawn every other day for a month to feed baby peregrine falcons above a cliff 700 feet above the ocean in California. I bushwacked through devil’s club in the North Cascades. I learned Spanish slang in the cab of an 18-wheeler rolling through the Patagonian night. I hitchhiked in Colombia. I rode in a hot air balloon over the Serengeti at sunrise. I watched an opera in a park in Rome. I hiked to a frozen waterfall in Croatia. I skied the Olympic ski slopes above Sarajevo. I climbed 4,000 ft to see an endangered bird on top of Mt. Gower, and then I descended and snorkeled the world’s most southerly coral reef. I walked into a Panamanian swamp in the middle of the night to photograph red-webbed gladiator frogs. I got lost in a whiteout in the Andes and survived the night by starting a cow-dung fire to stay warm. I broke camp in two minutes when I saw hundreds of thousands of ants coming towards my tent in Brazil. I learned the Tibetan alphabet and held a conversation in Mandarin. I rappelled into a crevasse. I caught a piranha and ate it. I tracked howler monkeys through the rainforest in Mexico. I stared into a crater of boiling lava atop a volcano in Chile. I soaked in a hot spring underneath Bolivia’s highest mountain. I watched a condor soar above Colca Canyon in Peru. I got healed by a shaman in Thailand. I canoed past bull sharks in Costa Rica. I radio tracked burrowing toads in South Korea. I woke up in Ghana, walked across the river to Ivory Coast, then came back and had a nice Nigerian-style breakfast.

Kerry's rules of travel

In no particular order...

1) Take a backpack, sleeping bag and sleeping pad

2) No plans, no schedule, no return ticket

3) No guidebook

4) Find a map (nice hotels usually have free maps)

5) Learn the language if they don't speak yours

6) Be able to entertain yourself (you will have to wait around)

7) Reserve a room for the first night in a foreign country. Don't reserve any other rooms.